One of the most anticipated gadgets of the year is without a doubt the Apple Watch. Even if you’re not sold on the idea of wearable computing, this is Apple entering an entirely new product category, but it’s not the first one to get there. With smartphones and tablets, Apple was doing something significantly different than other companies, but Android Wear, Pebble, and many smaller players are already doing similar things. This is Apple, though. If wearables were just a passing fad before, it’s a real product category now.
Using a completely new type of product can be confusing, but we’ve got some quick videos that can get you up to speed with the Apple Watch.
To use the Apple Watch, you need to pair it first. Open the Watch app on your iPhone and hit “pair” on both the phone and watch. The phone will pull up a camera viewfinder that you point at the watch screen to verify the Bluetooth connection. If that doesn’t work, there’s a PIN code you can enter. The iPhone app will then walk you through the rest of the setup like setting left or right wrist, location settings, passcodes, and apps.
The watch face is arguably the most important part of a smartwatch, which is still a watch after all. Changing the watch face on the Apple Watch isn’t the most intuitive process, but there are only a few things to remember. Use the force touch (press harder on the screen) to bring up the list of faces, then scroll side-to-side to pick one. If there are configuration options, you can scroll through your options with the digital crown.
Controlling music on the Apple Watch comes in two forms — you can sync one playlist to the watch to play locally from a Bluetooth headset, or just use the watch to control playback on the iPhone. Either way, you need to head into the music settings in the Apple Watch app to enable it. Make sure music is shown in Glances so you can get to it easily, then open the music app on the watch. You can control playback on the watch and get back to the music app at any time with a series of crown presses.
The key to a smartwatch is app support, and there are already a lot of Apple Watch-compatible apps at launch. You can install and remove apps on the watch from the iPhone watch app. Simply go into the app list to see everything on your phone that has Apple Watch support. You can tap on any of them to either show or remove it from the watch.
Notifications are a big deal on smartwatches. Why take the phone out of your pocket every time it beeps when you can just look at your wrist? There are a lot of options to go through, but start in the iPhone watch app and turn off notifications for apps you don’t want showing up on your wrist. Apple’s own apps have a bit more granularity with custom notification settings. The main system settings can also be used to turn third-party notifications on and off as usual.
Sending a text message on the Apple Watch can be done in one of two ways. The easiest way is to use Siri to compose a text. Long-press the digital crown to pull up Siri, and tell it to send a text message to
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